Category Archives: Business Development

These blogs focus on business development services we offer and what we’d recommend for you.

Dream V goal – how do you know if your prospect is ready for change?

The ActionCoach formula for change is a brilliant insight, it says,

(D+V)x F > R

You don’t need to be a mathematical genius to crack it, just read this Blog. So, what do the letters stand for?

D is for desatisfaction

V is for vision

F is for first steps 

R is for resistance 

The formula basically says that, in order to achieve change, or a sale, your prospect needs to have taken three steps already:

  1. Identified what they want
  2. Realised that things must change
  3. Taken some first steps, such as allocating a budget

In addition, all of the above must be greater than the resistance to change, which will naturally exist in their organisation.

I have written before about the Status Quo Bias, which so often stands between you and completing a sale. Well, this formula explains the key reasons for this phenomenon very well.

It also highlights the two key ingredients to take into account in the sales process: identifying the right time and building a strong relationship. Here is why:

Identifying the right time: How many times have you met with a prospect and came out feeling you have nailed it, only to end up with the opportunity being stuck in your pipeline? This happens because in your meeting, you did identify some buying signals, most probably around desire, and maybe even vision. However, you have missed some key information which would have explained the stagnation. 

The reason the opportunity did not progress is that it was most likely not the right time because there was no budget or perhaps there was too much resistance to change in the organisation.

Building a strong relationship: Many sales people mistakenly think that building rapport is the most important step in building a relationship. Over the years, I have discovered that most decision makers are surrounded by people who are trying to please them. If that’s all you do as a sales person, you will not win their trust or get to the bottom of what is really troubling them.

If this is how you build prospect relationships, you probably came away feeling positive because the two of you had a laugh, or talked about things you both find annoying which you took to be buying signals. In fact, what you came away with is most probably their desire and not much else which, as we are discovering, is not enough to make a sale.

Hopefully, by now, you are starting to understand that most sales opportunities never mature because they should have never been described as such. Some key ingredients that make a sale were missing as you did not get all the pieces in the puzzle.

How do you make sure this does not happen again? You train yourself to ask hard questions and make sure you know the answers to the next four questions before you forecast a win:

  1. What has your prospect got in place at the moment?
  2. What is the key issue with it?
  3. How problematic is the issue for their organisation’s survival or growth?
  4. What is their plan of action for change?

If you can’t get the answer to the any of the questions above, you are not likely to make a quick sale. That does not mean you walk away from it, it just means you have to keep in touch, keep building that relationship and your knowledge, until the time is right.

Interested in finding out more? Why not take advantage of our one hour sales process gap analysis meeting. Offered free of charge for the month of August. Get in touch here.

Looking for gaps- are we just being negative?

Looking for the missing pieces in a puzzle is something that we are taught from a young age. Have you noticed how much time you spend dealing with questions such as:

  • What could the business improve upon?
  • What could you do better?
  • What is missing from your current offering?
  • Could your team do more?

Whichever way you look at it, we spend a lot more time concentrating on the things we haven’t quite got right, rather then what we have already accomplished.

The question I wanted to examine here is whether this negative way of thinking is harmful. There is no right or wrong answer here. I have read many positive psychology books and think it’s an important concept to bring into your life, but I don’t believe you are either all positive or all negative. Life is more complex than that and requires different answers to different questions and needs.

When it comes to creating systems in your business, identifying existing gaps in the process is key to making changes that really matter. Many business owners enjoy doing more than strategizing or creating systems and there is a lot to be said about learning through action. But unless you ask what you could have done better, you will never get the full value out of these learning experiences.

One key system to get right in your business is your sales process. You could argue that selling is selling and always consists of five key elements:

  • Lead generation
  • Lead qualification
  • Pitch
  • Follow up
  • Conversion

This is very true, but every business still has its unique blueprint, based on trial and error, which creates your own unique sales success. So how do you go about bottling this? You analyze your actions by considering two key steps:

  • Start by considering what you and your team currently do in each step of the sales process above
  • Then work out what is missing and how you could improve the process

This will help you define your own sales process and help you identify some key steps you can take to make it even better and improve your conversion. Selling is all about conversion, so if you do this exercise often enough, you will see a real difference to your sales revenue which is the lifeblood of your business.

Coming back to my initial point, this is a great example of where a gap analysis exercise can help you appreciate what you already do well but allow you to increase your success through making improvements. So negative and positive thinking can work together to create a better outcome.

At YBDT, we start all sales consultancy projects with a gap analysis to ensure that we help our clients identify the key areas we can work on together to develop and improve. If you think this might be a good starting point, why not take our sales readiness test here.

Building results on knowledge

A leading American sales strategist Mike Puglia said: “Establishing trust is better than any sales technique.” When you are looking at developing a strategy for sustainable sales growth the quality of the relationships you have developed with your prospective clients will be critical to your success.

Building those relationships and the trust that goes with them needs to be planned carefully. Without an overarching plan, any sales activity will lack focus and outcomes will be harder to measure. A sales and marketing plan needs to cover all the elements needed to deliver new customers to your business. To do that you need to build understanding of who they are and where to find them. In particularly, you need to consider the below elements:

  • Target market analysis – A target market analysis assesses how your product or service fits into the markets where it will gain the most traction with customers. A target market analysis will help you establish strategies for effective marketing and sales techniques, by simply being where your clients are.
  • Finding opportunities for growth – Identifying where clients’ needs are not being met within the market place, or where problems are left unsolved, are good places to find opportunities for sales growth.
  • Setting clear goals – We have all come across SMART objectives and they remain a good guide to goal setting. They provide a base for building KPIs against which you can assess the success of your plan.

YBDT can work with you to build a sustainable sales and marketing strategy. Creating that plan will require a comprehensive understanding of your business, and we undertake the analysis of both your business and the marketplace that will build the knowledge needed to create sales growth. With that strategy created we will then be able to support its roll out into your business through our Sales Enablement service.

Building a sales process tailored to your business and supporting the training of your sales team in its implementation are the first steps. It may be that our business development team can support the early generation and nurturing of the leads created by your plan, freeing up your skilled salesforce to concentrate on closing deals and supporting existing business.

Our experience in all aspects of sales and marketing support makes us the ideal partner for businesses looking to grow in 2022. We can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy and generate and nurture leads to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help or watch this 60 second video to learn more about our service: https://youtu.be/BFwVi-LxQqQ

Bruce Springsteen knows all about sustainable sales results, do you?

We often lead our blogs with a quote from a writer or speaker on sales techniques, but inspiration for how you approach sales improvement can come from many sources. In this case Bruce Springsteen “Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose and of action over a long period of time.”  

As someone who has built a successful career on consistency and developing relationships with his audience, The Boss is a good role model when it comes to looking at the process which goes on in the mind of the customer when they are moving towards a decision to buy from you. All successful selling follows a process of building and developing relationships. These can take some time to solidify and yield results. To be effective the process of taking the initial interest and nurturing it needs to be very specific and based on a clear understanding of the prospect’s requirements and expectations.

The best way of achieving that understanding is to have a carefully crafted sales process that follows your customer’s journey from the initial interest through to cementing the relationship. Your Business Development Team works with our clients to create a tailored sales process which is the essential first step towards converting more prospects. Identifying and refining your target markets and the key points that will encourage them to buy from you leads into the sales process that guides them to an understanding of your business and how it will work for them. With the sales process in place YBDT can help you communicate it to your sales teams and support its roll out into your business.

Identifying and nurturing the prospects who will contribute to your sales growth is as we have said before, time consuming. We have pointed out in earlier blogs that it can take anything from five to eight contacts to bring a company to the point where they are ready to buy, and it’s a point we can’t make often enough as so many businesses give up early in the process. Using our specialist business development team to call the prospects in your sales pipeline to feed consistent high-quality leads into your account managers and salespeople frees their time up to concentrate on closing sales and supporting existing client retention.

Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums were commercial failures. But he had the building blocks in place to understand what his audience wanted from him, and the tools to deliver it, and used them to create the successful work that followed. YBDT can offer you the tools to build a consistent process which will lead to your sales success. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you generate, nurture, and convert your prospects.

Developing the hidden opportunities in your customer base

Whatever way you look at it, generating additional sales requires additional time and resources to maximise the opportunities available to you. As with most other things in business, working smarter rather than harder is the key to achieving the best return on investment.

You doubtless already have strong working relationships with long standing clients, but how well do they understand you and the full range of services your offer? Research conducted in 2021 for a leading B2B business portal found that 65% of the companies surveyed sold just one product or service to their top ten customers. There are two points to take away from this:

  1.  There is an audience who is already convinced of the key benefits to them of dealing with your company.
  2. Sales of one product or service is more vulnerable to your competitors than a wider range of sales would be.

A client who benefited from YBDT’s help in selling more products to existing clients is Harrier Pneumatics. Their core business was built around supplying new and replacement compressors to industrial customers. Working with our Sales Enablement Consultancy service helped them to identify the best routes to adding to the suite of products and services that their existing clients would benefit from. As in this example, an important part of YBDT’s sales consultancy is analysing your existing client base and their activity. This improves your understanding of the best opportunities to add sales, and to strengthen customer relationships. This goes well with another measure from the said report which states that 70% of the businesses surveyed said that they welcomed proactive approaches from trusted suppliers that saved money or improved their own customer service.

When working for Harrier Pneumatics we discovered that many of their customers were replacing components when regular maintenance would prevent failures, preventing costly production downtime and emergency call outs. Planned maintenance helped Harrier by keeping them in more regular contact with clients and putting them on the spot to discuss upgrades and system expansions. It moved them from being just suppliers of a single part to being a dependable partner in the upkeep of compressed air systems.

YBDT’s sales consultancy service is ideal for companies who need to understand how, why, and when their customers buy. It may be that purchases are made cyclically meaning that you need to be ahead of the competition in discussing renewals of maintenance contracts. Products bought irregularly mean that you need to be in front of the decision maker often enough to seize the opportunity when it arises. Likewise, if you depend on distributors to feed your business string relationships and knowledge of exactly what you do is critical to enable them to sell your products and services effectively.

A final relevant statistic: “It is six to seven times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.” I mentioned earlier the risk associated with supplying a single product into a major client. YBDT’s sales consultancy service can help you make the transition from supplier to partner, safeguarding existing work, and building firm foundations for the future. Get in touch with me to learn more about how YBDT can help.

Consistent messages inspire customer confidence

In one of our newsletters recently we used the quote “Consistency breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds confidence, and confidence breeds sales” from Jay Conrad Levinson. He was the author of the 1984 book ‘Guerrilla Marketing’. While many of the marketing strategies that he suggested proved short-lived, his key point about consistency being the best way to secure long term customers is more valid than ever.

There has been lots of research into how businesses buy. The main takeaway from it is that it needs an average of seven contacts before a client is ready to make a buying decision. When they surveyed clients from a range of business sizes and types the CRM provider HubSpot discovered that 44% of sales people gave up after a single follow up. Pressure of sales targets, and servicing existing clients was blamed for this. But whatever the reason there is a mismatch between what the average internal sales team can achieve and the potential customer’s mindset.

Connecting with the client is the most important thing you can do to build a relationship. Emails only take the process so far. Picking up the phone and letting them hear your company’s name and the fact that you are there to support them when the time is right to talk is the single most effective way of following up a sales conversation.

In a restaurant the waiter will often follow up delivering food to your table, asking if everything is OK. Often, we just smile and say, “yes thanks”, but occasionally we do need something else or have a problem that is stopping our enjoyment of the meal. The same applies in a sales conversation. You provide the answer to a question and then follow up appropriately to confirm that all was well with the resolution to the query. The biggest concern of a salesperson can often be that they are being annoying or intrusive with follow ups. The reason for employing a professional lead nurturing service is to make the difference between being supportive and the waiter who constantly asks if everything is fine.

New business is vital to your business growth. Generating and nurturing leads that build a pipeline of sales potential for the future can be something that does not fit easily into the working pattern of your existing team who are focusing their energy on servicing and retaining existing customers.

YBDT can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy to generate and nurture leads up to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders. We can’t put it any better than one of our long-term clients. David Champ of TC Consult. “Using YBDT gives you an opportunity to focus on your sales process. Ultimately, it’s a much quicker more efficient process than trying to organically grow a sales team. If you are familiar with your core business but not with sales, why would you try and create a spec for a business development manager when you could use experts to help you and see results a lot quicker?”

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.

What’s more important, getting the strategy right or keeping activities up?

The phrase ‘putting the cart before the horse’ certainly comes to mind in this case, so here are a few interesting facts (kindly supplied by Phrases.org.uk):

  • The earliest known reference to this phrase was made by John Haywood in 1589
  • hysteron proteron is a figure of speech we inherited from the Greeks, in which the thing that should come second is put first
  • There are more ‘horse phrases’ in English than those referring to any other animal

Education moment over, let’s consider the question in the title, in terms of what’s more important; both a good strategy and quality activities are as important. The question to consider rather, is order and timing. The answer very much depends on your personality type and I have used some information from DISC profiling to explain this better below.

According to DISC research there are four key personality types:

  1. Dominant (D): Places emphasis on accomplishing results and “seeing the big picture.” They are confident, sometimes blunt, outspoken, and demanding. Whilst people who fall within the D behaviour style will appreciate the need for a strategy to run a successful course of action, they will generally feel that ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ and would therefore want to see some timely actions they can measure and analyse.
  2. Influential (I): Places emphasis on influencing or persuading others. They tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic, open, trusting, and energetic. People who fall within the I behaviour styles generally have low attention span for details and could find a strategy document cumbersome and limiting unless it’s entirely their idea. High I’s would prefer to get out there and approach things in a way that suits them, the moment and complements their skill.
  3. Steady (S): Places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, loyalty, and dependability. They tend to have calm, deliberate dispositions, and don’t like to be rushed. People who fall within the S behaviour style would want to make sure that any new approaches or changes are accompanied by a clear strategy ensuring everyone is on board and in agreement. Once they have approved the strategy, they are happy to turn to action.
  4. Conscientious (C): Places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise and competency. They enjoy their independence, demand the details, and often fear being wrong. People who fall within the C behaviour style find the notion of making a mistake terrifying and often procrastinate as a result. With high C’s, achieving timely action can sometimes be difficult.

So, the answer to the question does depend on your behavioural style but from a lead generation perspective our recommendation is to always create a detailed strategy first covering your goals, target markets and campaign approach. Once you have this in place, ensure you follow up with a timely action to ensure your sales are not delayed.

At YBDT we can help you create such a lead generation strategy and support it delivery. Read more about it here: https://www.yourbizdevteam.co.uk/sales-and-marketing-strategy.php

Selling clarity for your technical products

Some products are relatively straightforward to sell. Potential clients can appreciate the function and benefit of the offer. Other products need a certain a level of understanding before the business gain becomes clear.

An interesting example of this is Newicon, a client we started to work with sometime ago. They help companies to create effective digital products. That can mean websites, mobile apps, desktop software, or anything else that falls into the digital realm. One of the things that all their clients have in common is that they are doing something new and often untried.

Lead generation for a company like this is often about building confidence. Giving potential clients the information they need about Newicon to feel they can say, “I don’t know if this is possible but can you…” They have a vision for their business that they hope Newicon can turn into reality. This sort of confidence is not built in a single call or meeting and when Newicon approached YBDT to help them generate strategic leads they were clear that it was not an overnight project.

YBDT’s work was in two main areas, firstly, taking responsibility for the follow up for new and existing leads. The confidence we mentioned above is generated through understanding and building a relationship over time is the way to create understanding. YBDT’s telemarketing team spent time with the potential clients building trust and interest until they were ready for the more technical conversation that is the domain of Newicon’s own team.

The second critical aspect of this work was having a clear sales process through the efficient use of a CRM system that could keep the senior team up to date on the progress of prospects. This allows accurate sales forecasting and workflow management and can ensure that when a lead reaches the stage where the technical discussion is taking place that the resources to support it are available. Of course, “technical products” take many forms. Developing hardware solutions that fit the needs of a client demands the same level of understanding to effectively support development as software. Being clear on the potential customer’s values and expectations is often as important as their requirements for product performance.

The word “confidence” has appeared several times in this piece. Client’s confidence in Newicon to deliver the final digital product that they will build their business around, and Newicon’s confidence in YBDT to turn over a critical path to growth to us. Rich O’Brien, Newicon’s Head of Digital said of our work, “Since day one they have been attentive to our needs, provided expert advice, and patient support, and have been willing to go the extra mile to make the campaigns work.” Building a relationship with our own clients is the first step on YBDT’s path to supporting your plans for growth. Once we have your confidence, the possibilities are endless.

YBDT’s long experience in all aspects of sales and marketing support makes us the ideal partner for software and technology based businesses. We can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy and generate and nurture leads to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.

Can you build your business on referrals alone?

Here is a great quote from the American politician, Bob Bennet: ‘in sales, referral is the key to the door of resistance’. I could not agree more and nor can most companies we speak to. So much so that it is very common to hear business owners and sales directors say that their conversion goes up to as much as 90% when following up on referrals.

So why are referrals so much better than a lead?

It might be worth understanding the difference first, here is Ivan Misner’s definition:

‘A lead is a contact that may come from any number of sources. The contact is generally not expecting your call.  A referral is the opportunity to do business. When you contact them, they already know who you are and what you do. It is stronger than just a lead in that this prospect has talked to your mutual acquaintance and is generally expecting your call.’

For me, it’s not so much about the prospect expecting your call, you can get that through other methods of lead generation, but more about the building of familiarity and trust. This is what happens when someone they trust recommend you and effectively make you an extension of them in the eyes of the prospect. In a competitive market, it can be very hard to decide which supplier to use. The less you know about the topic you are looking to resolve, the harder is it to trust a third party, a good referral is therefore a great way to save time and make a better decision.

How can your business get more referrals then?

You could say that referrals happen over time through the building of your brand and reputation. In a perfect world, if you work hard and do a good job, customers should be coming to you. This is why many established companies see 70% of their business coming from referrals and repeat business which helps them build longevity and success. Whilst it will be great if you could just focus on your work and expect referrals to come to you, there are two key questions you need to consider here:

  1. How do clients purchase your product and service? Is it a very competitive industry you are in? What is the key deciding factor?
  2. How well do you stand out against your competition, do you really make a difference to your clients? Will they be happy to sing your praises?

In my experience, if you operate in a niche market and offer a unique service, you will get more referrals as there are not many people who do what you do. However, if like most businesses, you operate in a competitive market, you will need to build referral partner relationships to increase your referral rates. This can be done through a number of channels including formal and informal networking as well as client referral schemes and more.

However you get there, building an effective referral network depends on two key factors:

  •   Being clear on who you want to work with and why
  • Making a real difference to clients through your work

These may sound obvious, but they take some thinking and changing. 68% of customers who stop buying from an organisation do so simply because of a perceived indifference. When it comes to building referral partnerships, this can become even a bigger issue, making it hard for people to refer you effectively.

So, can you build your business on referrals alone?

At YBDT we prefer to have several funnels providing new business leads into our company. This is because whilst referrals are easier to convert, they depend on your networks’ availability and access to prospects who need your services at a given time. Therefore, you will find that referral numbers fluctuate greatly from month to month making them hard to forecast.

So, if you are looking to grow your business you will want to create other options to give you and even flow of new leads. However, referrals are key and learning how to become more effective at generating them is important. Our next sales enablement webinar will be offering tips on how to do just that, click on the link below for more information and registration: https://www.yourbizdevteam.co.uk/ybdt-lunchtime-webinar-20220322.php

Growing your insurance business needs positive action

At first sight the prospects for the insurance markets in 2022 seem less than optimistic. With the news full of economic and political gloom it would be easy to see this year as a time to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. The insurance industry news is far more positive however, with businesses making acquisitions, investing in new technology and recruiting new staff.

With many companies focusing their business development teams on retention and support for existing business generating new prospects can take a back seat. This is despite the 2021 Insurance Value Creators Report from Boston Consulting suggesting that the businesses that thrive in 2022 will be those targeting new business as well as maintaining their existing client portfolio.

The balancing act that this needs is illustrated in YBDT’s work for Higos Insurance. With a business providing independent insurance advice cover for wide range of commercial and personal risks Higos have opportunities in many sectors. The personal nature of Higos’ service means that their internal sales teams spend a lot of their time working with current clients. The leadership team were keenly aware that they needed to generate new prospects for their skilled business development managers to convert. They approached Your Business Development Team in early 2020 to build a strategy for identifying renewal dates and understanding current cover and future requirements of targeted industry and geographic areas.

Once the objective of building a pipeline of potential future business was in place, monthly telemarketing campaigns were implemented to specific regions of the country and industry-based databases. With a highly skilled insurance industry telemarketer on YBDT’s team we were able to provide directly relevant information that Higos’ internal sales teams could use to offer better cover and cost options to potential new clients. Once this information has been added to a CRM system for review by Higos sales team they were ideally placed to secure new business from the YBDT led campaigns.

The result of this ongoing work has been a steady input of prospect data into Higos, giving their team the information that enables them to help the client improve their insurance cover, as well as knowing when action will need to be taken based on YBDT’s telemarketer providing expected renewal dates. As Higos BDM, Nick Reynolds told us: “I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending YBDT to any organisation that want to create a sales campaign or indeed want to enhance their current sales structure. Their professionalism, organisation and tenacity has created sales opportunities for me and my colleagues meaning we can generate more new businesses in the months to come.”

YBDT’s long experience in all aspects of sales and marketing support makes us the ideal partner for the growing insurance business. We can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy and generate and nurture leads to the point that your sales team can take them on to convert to new business. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.